GCBASIC Reviews

I absolutely love GCBasic. The software has made it easy for someone like me, a non programmer to enjoy the electronics hobby with minimum frustration. Microcontroller projects can be coded easily and quickly even for beginners like myself. Software is easy to use and does pretty much anything I would ever need. I appreciate everyone's effort who works on GCBasic!

A great help to program PIC processors.

First time I had contact to GCB is now 8 years ago. I did multiple projects with GCB. As time went by, it became more and more comfortable and it's a nice complement for doing some works with micro processors. I still love it. Thanks to Evan and his crew! Very excellent jobs done!

A brilliant IDE, very versatile. In a previous life I programmed PIC devices using assembler but with the latest devices (and my age - 79) this is no longer possible so a high level language became necessary. Well done to all concerned.

I'm an ancient assembler PIC programmer (MPLAB/X) revisiting the tech as a hobby. Wanted higher level language (used GWbasic/VB a lot in a previous life) - so Basic for Pic as I don't 'do' C. Great to find you! Installed ok - first program ok, pickit2 worked fine on PIC16F690 on a dust-removed LPC demo board. I've been using GCB only 2 days, so very newbie review only: 1) change to Pic-as by Microchip has me wondering - so wanted to jump from gcasm to mpasm to pic-as. Took me a few hours to locate how to do it - main menus are text, prog menus are icons, assembler selection are in tabs (simply didn't spot them) - would prefer a consistent user interface. I pin "Edit programmer preferences" to the top, but this isn't retained when I re-open GCB. 2) I open new project and GCB inserts an info file for program structure - but half of it is in German - now trying to find what/why this is and edit it. So far it's been finnicky to configure stuff for a (very) newbie, but overall I'm keen to use it, just thought I'd give some initial feedback. Really looking forward to a Linux flavour (Debian/Mint/Ubuntu) sometime. Thanks for GCB + IDE, I am very grateful for your efforts.

GREAT COW BASIC for me ist the best software for programming microcontrollers , easy to understand and powerfull; however should be more publicized and made known with videos regularly, to make it known that it is evolving .about features in the main toolbar: it should have one icon for PCINFO for more rapidly access it is a very good program .The black screen is another thing that could be possible to change to protect our eyes. ( videos were welcome) To work with LCD display 16X2 OR 16X4 .... AND I2C the available adapters in demos are obsolet can not find them anyplace. YwRobot LCD1602 IIC V1 or the Sainsmart LCD_PIC I2C adapter. Ywmjkdz I2C adapter.to work with GCB and I2C can not be easy. it should be possible to use the adapters available in the market that everybody that works with arduino or python use. one video with this ..was welcome.. for the increasing of GCB I rated 5 stars dispite these little things, GCB deserves it. thanks for watching. charles.

I just started to use GCB. It's cool. I am trying to work with a WS2812B LED array soon. Thanks for making GCB.

Initial tests were going well and I found it easy to use the compiler however I ran into a problem as soon as I tried to set the device to PIC18F4431 and use the ADC functions, I was watching Evan Venn series on Great Cow Basic on You tube and the example video 4 but I got an error :- ReadAD line :- a-d.h (1786): Error: Incorrect parameters in Set, expected: Set variable.bit status I was unable to get any further on with my tests so for now my experience of Great Cow BASIC is on old until I can find a solution to this problem, How can I Fix this error ?, I was unable to get on the forum ,

I have tried to use GreatCowBasic about week. Before I have used CCS c-complier for the PIC project 30 years. It seemed like Visual Basic 6. There were only few settings to make. A started, I could do it working, but when I added this config word, I got it working because I do not have an external crystal == #chip 16F886, 8 #option explicit ' #config INTOSC_OSC_NOCLKOUT, BODEN_OFF == I it nice to make this kind of the project using ready made Basic Tools. It has been extreamly lot of works. I have found only few strange things. One is that these number works only in positive side Byte 8 Bit Integer 16 Bit Word 16 Bit Long 32 Bit There are also LontINT - (2 ^ 63) and 2 ^ 63 - 1 uLongINT 0 and 2 ^ 64 - 1 Single -3.4x10 ^ 38 and +3.4x10 ^ 38 Double -1.7x10 ^ 308 and +1.7x10 ^ 308 w But how I change these positive numbers to negative /positive numbers? in other language there are some forms like longw=(LongINT) bytew I has tried F1/(help) and tried to read net information, but no help. When I read AD reading from AD0 and AD1 and try to calculate a difference, I got only positive numbers. Can somebody help me? == Now I found integer ! DIM intw as Integer DIM bytew1 as byte DIM bytew2 as byte bytew1 =255 bytew2 = 244 intw = bytew2 -bytew1 HSerPrint intw ' -11 right! This worked Regards Pekka

Had some non sensical problems and the forum pointed me towards that I had got old version of both GCB and GCGB, I only set it up about 2 months ago. You obviously have to pay close attention to the download site you are using. Everything makes sense now, I feel a bit of a twit (I'm a brit). Will go to the close out.

I have been using Great Cow Basic for many years to program PIC chips. Only recently have I been using it for AVR chips. When I acquired the LGT8F328P chip, I used GCB to program it. All was good until I noticed an inconsistency with the ADC Voltage Reference. One post to The Great Cow Basic Help Forum, and within hours my problem was solved! I am really impressed! I Have also learned a lot from Evan Venn's YouTube videos! Keep up the good work!

This is an excellent package as it can be used to program many kinds of micro controllers. Please develop this good software continuously. This software allows control engineers to develop their ideas more conveniently.

Absolutely awesome. I'm an electronics hobbyist and the last time I did any programming was in the 80's with Applesoft Basic. I became interested in microcontrollers a few years ago with the Arduino's but found it hard to learn C++. This is what I was used to and looks so much more readable when viewing the code. I've had fun getting reacquainted with Basic again and have some projects in the works. Keep up the great work!

Cow basic gives the opportunity to exploit 8bit PIC microcontroller abilities, MUCH easier and FASTER than any other tool! Large library support with many simple to use commands, ease of use and simplicity in all (usually compilcated) startup settings and configures, allows you to "focus" immediately to the actual code you want to develop! And help & support by the community, is EXCELLENT too! ;-)

Very good!

A very easy to use compiler. More features added regularly. Produces fast asm for pic and avr with same basic code. Good alternative to using C++ . Ideas become real quickly.

I have been following this project for a long time. The BASIC language is very simple to use and Great Cow BASIC compiles to get a code for highly optimized AVR and PIC microcontrollers. It is important that the same source code can be used with very few changes in these two popular families of microcontrollers.

Outstanding BASIC compiler for 8bit PICs and AVRs! This compiler is constantly being improved by very proactive developers. You can really take full advantage of the micro's capabilities and there is also an easy to use PPS tool to configure the pins on the newer PICs. This allows you to reassign pins which comes in handy while developing a PCB for your project. GCB is one of my favorite tools for programming, it really has come a long way and creates incredibly efficient asm. Try it... you'll love it!

Great effort by GCBasic developers and contributors. Hope to see more features in future versions. There is always room for improvement.

Responsive Community, constantly growing :-)

Really the best.

Impressive how small and fast is the generated Code is.

Simply fabulous. I have been programming since the days of the ZX80 and ZX81, using a variety of programming languages. To list but a few: Sinclair Basic, OPL {Psion} [Organiser Programming Language], COBOL, [Early] Visual Basic, QBasic, Turbo Pascal and Delphi [Pascal for Windows]. Delphi is the language I worked with the most, and the one I enjoyed the most. All of the above have a syntax that is 'Basic' like. I've worked in C, and whilst I can read it, I don't enjoy it that much. When looking into Microprocessor programming for my own personal use, I saw PIC processors but was put off using them as I initially thought they could only be programmed using assembler or an expensive compiler. I tried to learn assembler programming, but could not make any sense of it whatsoever and gave up. Some years later, I discovered the mBed platform and bought myself an mBed board. I programmed this to create a clock for myself which told the time using a single LED that flashes out the time automatically every five minutes in a sequence of hours, tens of minutes, units of minutes. I then looked at some other projects but was put off by the cost of incorporating an mBed board in each device. I then discovered the superb PicAxe devices. These are modified PIC processors running a custom interpreter that allows the program to be written in [PicAxe] Basic then uploaded to the processor using a very simple serial interface. The PicAxe devices require no complex motherboards nor do they have convoluted power requirements they simply need connecting up correctly and programming. Done. I used many different PicAxe devices to build many projects, both for myself and the further education college I worked for. One downside of the PicAxe devices is that the cost of the processors is a little higher than the PIC processors they are based on. For single builds of a piece of equipment this isn't an issue given the speed of development they offer, but for my newer job where we might need to make a few hundred units, the PIC devices become far more competitive in price. Also the interpreter on the PicAxe device causes the code to be executed slower than the code generated by Great Cow Basic then loaded into the equivalent PIC. Great Cow Basic offers the ability to continue using a programming language I'm familiar with, to program PIC processors. I use a GQ-4X programmer for some of the Eprom devices we use and this can program the PIC devices with the code generated from Great Cow Basic. I currently tend to build and program any prototype units with PicAxe processors, then having ironed out any issues with the design I transfer over to the equivalent PIC device, with Great Cow Basic. There are a few minor annoyances with Great Cow Basic, but the majority of those annoyances are that whilst PicAxe Basic and Great Cow Basic are dialects of Basic, they are different and I'm often caught out by the subtleties of the languages.The fact that one language requires the end of an 'If' statement to use the token 'EndIf' and the other to use 'End If' is caught by the pre-processor. But I still find myself wondering why something doesn't work as planned only to find I've Defined a variable as being called 'A_Variable' but later in the code accidentally referenced it as 'A_Variabl'. This doesn't cause the pre-processor to complain, it silently creates a second variable 'A_Variabl' which of course has a different value to the original. Yet given how breathtakingly good Great Cow Basic is, I feel it is extremely churlish to be so rude as to point this type of thing out. The writers of Great Cow Basic should be proud of their achievements, it is a collection of programs that work wonderfully well and I want to thank all involved for their generosity, enthusiasm and the sheer quality of them.

just ok, some improvements in the editor, in memory management, string manipulating and the timer routines needed, but anyway just ok to fullfill most of my expectations

Very good, Great programming language, easy to learn. You can do almost everything in a very simple way!